After being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, Katja Pavlovna co-founded the Sorry My Mental Illness Isn’t Sexy Enough For You website to help others
atja Pavlovna doesn’t think any mental illness is sexy, of course. But her mental health initiative,, addresses a very real issue, namely the way some conditions carry a greater stigma than others.
Pavlovna, 34, a language teacher from the West Midlands, founded the project in 2021, shortly after being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder . “I set it up with my friend Kay Garbett, who also has a personality disorder,” she says. “We had numerous conversations about the way that if you Google ‘personality disorder’, you get loads of information, but few stories about lived experience. We set up the project to give a voice to people who don’t normally have one.
It was tough at first, says Pavlovna. “People didn’t want to talk to us. Most representation of serious mental illness is really negative and reinforces harmful stereotypes.” But when users saw honest and accurate reflections of the lived reality of mental health conditions, the submissions started flooding in. Pavlovna and Garbett often discovered conditions they had never heard about.
“You can have a relatively normal life with a personality disorder,” Pavlovna says. “That really put my mind at rest.” In fact, the diagnosis has been helpful at work. “It meant I could communicate what was wrong to other people, and make adjustments.”
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